NOWs: reprint. Change through Reproduction

Gesellschaft für zeitgenössische Kunst Osnabrück e. V.
Kunstraum hase29
Hasestr. 29/30
49074 Osnabrück

Opening: 9 May, 7 pm

With: Manfred Blieffert, Nick Ervinck, Jonas Fleckenstein, Kati Gausmann, Birgit Kannengießer, Lola Läufer, Jan Neukirchen, Sophia Pompéry, Hannah Regenberg, David Semper, Nasan Tur, Wiebke Wilms

Reproducing things not only means reproducing them, but also opens up the question of how the reproduced is changed by the process of reproduction? Does what is reproduced influence our old idea of a unique original? In today’s digital world, the originals no longer exist, but artificial artefacts, complex ideas and digital images that at best refer back to what has already been reproduced.

The change that has been introduced since the beginnings of reproduction processes (19th century: Photography; 20th century: Film / video; 21st century: 3-D printing) is likely to continue. The old idea of the original masterpiece will not dissolve, but will change fundamentally – reproductions are images that reproduce their own creation process in a refined and now highly technical way, thereby relativizing the earlier claim of art to produce unique originals. Reproduction means today: to take up old pictures and new procedures in order to transform them into new pictorial realities with applied reproduction techniques. Everything that can be repeated and, above all, digitalized today can be reproduced at will.

This exhibition presents works by artists who take a given “model” (a typographic detail, a mesh pattern, a napkin ornament, a stamp pad) as their starting point and create new variations. The result is always a result between a changed original pattern (original) and a newly documented form of reproduction, which gradually emerges through an ever-new reproduction.